Brand Recognition

An image from the Oscar-nominated animated short, Ryan. Courtesy NFB

Any Torontonian trudging through the slush in miserable mid-February is invited by a sandwich board at the corner of Richmond and John Sts., in the heart of downtown, to come inside a warm, softly-lit glass building to watch two Oscar-nominated films. The movies — Ryan, an electrifying 3D-computer-animated short about an aging animator’s fall from grace and Hardwood, a 29-minute documentary about a mutual reckoning between a son and the Harlem Globetrotter father who walked out on him — are free and available at any time during business hours to anyone who wants to sit in a cushy spaceship-style “personal viewing station” replete with wide-screen TV and speakers that wrap around the head.

Welcome to the Mediatheque, the National Film Board’s $1.5-million Toronto headquarters. (Montreal has its own version, the CineRobotheque on St-Denis.) The showings, and the welcoming, open-door building, represent the NFB brand as the NFB wants you to think of it: accessible, entertaining and internationally lauded. Asked what comes to mind when confronted with the words “NFB brand,” Chris Landreth, who directed Ryan, says: “Legacy and tradition. Cutting edge. They do things nobody else does. They support and produce independent and auteur-driven stuff like no other organization in the world. You could never make a film like Ryan in the U.S.”

His answer would make Jacques Bensimon, government film commissioner and NFB chairman, giddy. The NFB’s presence at this year’s Academy Awards is another affirmation that the institution’s larger strategy — three-and-a-half years in the making — is working. After years of cutbacks and mismanagement, Bensimon was brought on board to restore a reputation that had become badly tarnished, and to remind the public of the NFB’s halcyon days as a world leader in the fields of documentary and animated filmmaking.

“The NFB is a brand,” says Bensimon from his Montreal office. “All our research tells us that the NFB is part of Canadians’ lives. They grew up with it and it was part of their schooling. There’s no doubt that we have some power with the words NFB that we haven’t harnessed yet. When I came on board, we decided to put as much weight on that brand as possible.”

Scottish filmmaker John Grierson was the NFB’s first commissioner when the Liberals created the National Film Board in 1939 with the lofty directive to “make and distribute films designated to help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts.” When, in 1956, the NFB set up a massive headquarters outside Montreal that rivaled top Hollywood studios, the institution hit its stride. For the next two decades, the NFB became proud home to renowned animator Norman McLaren — earning the NFB its second Oscar in 1952 for the pixilated short Neighbours — and a wave of avant-garde French-Canadian filmmakers who brought cinéma-vérité documentaries to the world.

But as the Canadian film industry expanded, the NFB’s mandate began to seem narrow, a throwback to protectionist times in a bustling open market. While the NFB has earned 68 Oscar nominations and 10 statues, it hasn’t actually won since the animated short Bob’s Birthday took home an award in 1995. By 1989, the same year the NFB earned a 50th-anniversary honorary Oscar for its contributions to film, the Montreal lab was in the midst of dismantling. In 1996, the government slashed $30 million from the $90-million budget, cutting staff and productions to the bone. The NFB seemed impotent and irrelevant, a historical blip still lapping at the public coffers. In filmmaking circles, the brand was loathed; outside of them, forgotten. Many independent filmmakers called for the NFB’s closure.

“There’s always been a very contested relationship between the independent filmmaking community and the NFB,” says Barbara Evans, chair of the department of film and video at York University, and a producer of several NFB films. “They saw them as having an unfair advantage. They saw them as a competitor.”

Bensimon himself worked as a filmmaker at the NFB for 20 years, but he too escaped during the dark years for the relative sanity of TFO, the French network of TVOntario. “I left in the ’80s because I felt extremely frustrated by the institution. I thought it was unrealistic and didn’t have its feet on the ground. It wanted to do everything and at the same time it didn’t do anything well. It was an institution that had taken a turn for the worse.”

For 29-year-old Hubert Davis, maker of the Oscar-nominated Hardwood, the NFB was a confusing brand during his youth in the ’80s in Vancouver. “I think of filmstrips and social studies classes. I knew there was this great history there but I didn’t really know what it was. And later, when I started working, I heard it was this big, distancing thing where your film could get lost in the shuffle.”

Bensimon had to capitalize on the national pride inherent in the NFB brand, and chop back its leviathan reputation. Since his appointment as commissioner in 2001, he hasn’t strayed far from the mandate inscribed in the National Film Act of 1939 — “We must tell Canadian stories,” he says with great force — but his methods are radically modern. To renew ties with the public, the NFB built the new centres in Montreal and Toronto. Their massive archives came to public attention through a Film Club and innovations like this month’s Oscar walk-in campaign and online streaming.

But Bensimon’s biggest task has been revamping the NFB’s business practices. With government backing for 2004 at $62 million, and $7 million from the NFB’s own revenues, the operating budget is nearing $70 million, a figure that still demands streamlining staff and aggressive efforts towards local and global co-productions. The days of the NFB as just another isolated branch of the government are over.

“We’re part and parcel of an industry, and as part of industry, you’ve got to co-produce with partners, you’ve got to be very conscious of selling your product. That’s why we’ve built up a strong distribution unit in the business of pre-sales,” says Bensimon, citing the NFB’s links with the Discovery Channel and the Sundance Channel in the U.S., the CBC in Canada and with Canadian distribution companies like ThinkFilm. Both of this year’s Oscar nominees are co-productions: Hardwood with Faith Films, among others, and Ryan with Copper Heart Entertainment. Bensimon is particularly boastful of the creative relationship the NFB forged with Ryan: Landreth and Copper Heart used 12 graduate students in the animation department at Toronto’s Seneca College to complete the film.

“Working with students is exactly what we need to be doing. Everyone speaks of the days when Atom Egoyan and Denys Arcand came through here, but we have to be the place where the next generation can express itself,” says Bensimon.

Chris Landreth, speaking on a cellphone en route to a meeting with Disney in L.A., says: “It was the most ambitious short film the NFB had ever done. Three years in the making. What the NFB did was make sure the film got seen — at Cannes, at festivals in Toronto and Ottawa, at Sundance and so on. That’s a huge part of what the NFB does so well; they know how to get exposure.”

Ryan Larkin: the inspiration for Ryan. Photo by Liam Maloney. Courtesy NFB

Ryan tells the story of a former NFB star animator, Ryan Larkin, now a Montreal panhandler, who never lived up to the promise of his own Oscar nomination three decades ago. As stylish as anything Pixar has done, but more original — the faces of the characters melt and explode into their emotional states — Ryan is an intensely intimate investigation of the strange connection between these two filmmakers, one peaking, one peaked.

But is this high-tech, personal film loyal to Grierson’s vision, or Bensimon’s brand? “I hate that word brand. It’s so corporate,” says York's Barbara Evans. “This regime has improved the NFB’s broadcast presence tremendously, but I wonder about the NFB’s social mandate. I’d like to see them take on more social issues and community issues in a way that corporations just can’t.”

Bensimon says that the NFB is as socially relevant locally as ever, citing new initiatives to provide means for young filmmakers of colour: Hardwood was partially funded by the NFB’s Filmmakers Assistance Program which has a goal to promote “under-represented viewpoints.”

But Evans isn’t wrong: today’s NFB feels less “Canadian” than in the past, and that’s an intentional part of re-jigging the brand. Last year’s much discussed What Remains of Us, a documentary that captures a young Tibetan as she smuggles a video taped message from the Dalai Lama into her country, was a surprise shut out at the Oscars and next month, a co-production of Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, about Russian chess master Garry Kasparov, hits theatres. These types of borderless films, says Bensimon, represent the Canadian community as Grierson could never have imagined it.

“Filmmakers today are telling us they belong to this universe, and to this world. Canadians don’t see geographical boundaries as being a limitation, and therefore we’ve taken on the world as our subject,” he says.

And this Sunday, the whole world will be looking at Los Angeles. The NFB has been lobbying for eight months to get to the Oscars, ensuring Ryan and Hardwood showed up at the right festivals and industry events, and running ads in Variety to stay fresh in the minds of voters. “We’re calling in all favours,” laughs Bensimon.

Hardwood director Hubert Davis. Photo by Nicole Gurney. Courtesy NFB.

Davis plans to bring his wife, father and half-brother to the Oscars, a suitable mix for a film that celebrates the mish-mash of many contemporary families. Describing the whirlwind that ensues after the Oscar nomination, Davis says: “It’s like a bomb goes off. I always felt like my job was to go out there and make a good film, but this whole other machine that the NFB has working behind the film, the publicity and marketing, brings it to an entirely different level.”

His NFB producers gave him $10,000 to blow Hardwood up to a 35-mm print and made sure the film got seen at a festival sponsored by the influential International Documentary Association in the fall, a key to grabbing the attention of Academy voters. “As an independent filmmaker, you just don’t have the kind of access the NFB does,” says Davis.

While the film has a great contemporary subject on its side, it’s a long shot to win; Ryan, on the other hand, was recently pegged by Entertainment Weekly to win the NFB its coveted 11th award. (“We were?” says Landreth, surprised. “I should probably pick up a copy of that issue.”) Landreth knows what it’s like to attempt to navigate the Oscars without the NFB’s backing; 10 years ago, he was nominated for The End, an animated short he made with the software company Alias.

“There’s no comparison between these two occasions,” he laughs. “We did no lobbying. We had no strategy. We had no clue what a dog-and-pony show this is. And we were up against the Wallace and Gromit guys. We had no chance.”

Ryan’s win would be a sweet victory for Bensimon. With only one-and-a-half years left in his tenure, the man who re-branded the NFB is hoping to leave a golden legacy.

“Oscars are essential,” says Bensimon. “They are a barometer by which we measure the importance of films. They are recognition that we’re doing something right in documentary and animation. These 68 nominations are not a coincidence. Somewhere in Hollywood’s fantasy, the NFB is something unique that only Canadians can come up with. And I don’t think they’re wrong.”

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.